We were about to spring through the outer door, when the door at the rear flew open with a bang and the sailor landed on me with one leap. I went down with a thump and a crack of my head on the floor that sickened me. The gun was under my legs, and I remember that my dazed wits tried to devise means for getting hold of it. As my senses gradually came round I was aware of a great conflict about me and over me. Gillespie was engaged in a hand-to-hand struggle with the sailor and the cabin shook with their strife. The table went down with a crash, and Gillespie seemed to be having the best of it; then the Italian was afoot again, and the clenched swaying figures crashed against the trunk at the farther end of the room. And there they fought in silence, save for the scraping of their feet on the puncheon floor. I felt a slight nausea from the smash my head had got, but I began crawling across the floor toward the struggling men. It was growing dark, and they were knit together against the cabin wall like a single monstrous, swaying figure. My stomach was giving a better account of itself, and I got to my knees and then to my feet. I was within a yard of the wavering shadow and could distinguish Gillespie by his white trousers as he wrenched free and flung the Italian away from him; and in that instant of freedom I heard the dull impact of Gillespie's fist in the brute's face. As the sailor went down I threw myself full length upon him; but for the moment at least he was out of business, and before I had satisfied myself that I had firmly grasped him, Gillespie, blowing hard, was kneeling beside me, with a rope in his hands. "I think," he panted, "I should like champignon sauce with that steak, Donovan. And I should like my potatoes lyonnaise--the pungent onion is a spurring tonic. That will do, thanks, for the arms. Get off his legs and I'll see what I can do for them. You oughtn't to have cut that rope, my boy. You might have known that we were going to need it. My father taught me in my youth never to cut a string. I want the pirate's knife for a souvenir. I kicked it out of his hand when you went bumpety-bumpety. How's your head?" "I still have it. Let's get you outside and have a look at you. You think he didn't land with the knife?" "Not a bit of it. He nearly squeezed the life out of me two or three times, though. What's that?" "He gave me a jab with his sticker when he made that flying leap and I guess I'm scratched." Gillespie opened my shirt and disclosed a scratch across my ribs downward from the left collar bone. The first jab had struck the bone, but the subsequent slash had left a nasty red line.